Ljubisa Beara, a former Bosnian Serb officer convicted of genocide by a United Nations war crimes court for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, has died in a German prison, authorities said.

Beara, 77, a security chief in the wartime Bosnian Serb Army headquarters, died on February 8, authorities said on February 10.

Beara was convicted in 2010 of genocide for his role in the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica -- Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

Appeals judges at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague largely upheld the convictions in 2015, after which Beara was sent to Berlin's Tegel prison to serve his life sentence. The ruling was the first final judgment of genocide by the UN court.

Bosnian Serb troops overran Muslim forces and thinly armed UN troops in Srebrenica in July 1995 following a yearslong siege. They separated the men and the boys from the women and girls, killed most of the males, and buried their bodies in hastily dug mass graves.

Forensic experts in Bosnia have identified more than 6,100 of the victims so far and their remains have been reburied at a memorial center near Srebrenica.